War Machine

Lots of coverage in the papers about the nasty little war in the Caucasus. It sounds like Russia is absolutely steamrolling Georgia. Reports have them conducting bombing and heavy armor operations in South Ossetia and landing troops at ports in Abkhazia. It's actually a pretty good demonstration of the first part of what was known in the U.S. as the Powell Doctrine: if you're going to fight, go in fast and with overwhelming force.

This region has been officially "troubled" for some time now - Chechnya is right around the corner, after all. And it has been slowly heating up for months - there was this fascinating footage from about 6 months ago of a Russian jet shooting down a Georgian UAV:


I'm pretty ignorant of the details of the situation - Georgia was trying to put down separatist rebels, Russia came in as a peacekeeper, now it looks like Russia may try to annex both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I was wondering what the appeal was for these regions - they're only about 50 miles square each. Then I took at at this map they had up at the Information Dissemination blog. Notice the many, many oil and gas symbols south of the mountains. Mostly in Azerbaijan. But the pipeline that carries that crude out to the West is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, running right through Georgia. This is an awful little war, and I don't see it ending well.